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Congratulations to ravi_butani for DIY Smartphone controlled tiny plane as weekend project for children and parents You are the winner of the Grand Prize of a SNES Classic and a $200 Shopping Cart!
Congratulations to shabaz for Creating your own Handheld Electronic Games – Pocket Nim, fmilburn for the Rainbow Ukulele, luislabmo for Pimp my PICADE , and balearicdynamics for the The Musical Box! You are the First Place winners of the $100 Shopping Cart!
"Innovation is hard. It really is. Because most people don't get it. Remember, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, these were all considered toys at their introduction because they had no constituency. They were too new." - Nolan Bushnell, American businessman and electrical engineer. Established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre chain.
The Electronic Toys competition challenged you to build an electronic toy such as an executive toy, puzzle toy, educational toy, or cuddly toy. Or, you could create a techno toy from an existing toy by adding electronic innards. Toy design can be very sophisticated and its definitely big business. Games and toys often drive the electronics industry to develop new technology. The video game industry, a vehicle that's driven interest in computing and electronics engineering for many, comes to mind. There's not a project that was submitted that anyone would have an argument with choosing as a winner. For this winner's announcement we'll do something different. We'll talk about the many deserving projects that received votes but didn't win before turning our attention to the winners.
The following projects received first place votes from our community member judges:
connormiller worked on a wearables project that involved C/Python programming, sewing, soldering, Autodesk Fusion 360, and Circuit Design. It utilized a CO2 powered Gauntlet Webslinger, a Spidey Sense Rear Proximity Sensor to flag close objects, a Spidey Sense Rear Camera to use Microsoft Azure Machine Vision to report objects seen, and a small vibration motor that will rest on the neck and vibrate whenever the sensors report a danger. The result of the latest Raising Awesome video and you can check out the full project in Spider-Man: Into the Maker-Verse . In the first of three projects balearicdynamics decided to build a project for kids who were discovering Arduino for the first time. His objectives for the project were to make it easy to assemble and understand by a class of kids and to make the project components replicable as a medium-difficult assembly kit. As you would expect from a project from balearicdynamics, every box should have something original and he demonstrates that in The Useless Box. In a separate project, R2-D2 Arcade Live , he had the insane idea of setting-up the PiCade for live-action, control of an R2-D2 unit in a Star Wars simulated environment. Meanwhile, dubbie decided to try and make some sort of augmented reality game. Augmented Reality, as far as this project is concerned, is taking a video stream and processing it in some way and adding additional information on screen as an overlay. He's connected a PixyCam to his laptop and run the supplied PixyMon programme. He's trained the Pixycam to recognise yellow objects, in this case Lego men. Rather than sticking a complete laptop on the headset, he's used an LCD display connected via a HDMI cable. The trial LCD display is quite large but a much smaller one, probably 3.5 inches or maybe 5 inches, check out the video and first project blog post. This was the one project was on the bubble and almost declared a winner by the judges. You can check it out in ARBot #5 : The Final Working (after a fashion) System. mahmood.hassan built a small and fun DIY toy for little kids to teach them alphabets, numbers, shapes and much more in Kids Kingdom: Learn N Fun .
The following projects were chosen as your winners in the electronic toys competition:
ravi_butani was the Grand Prize Winner. In DIY Smartphone controlled tiny plane as weekend project for children and parents , he shows you how to build a DIY >$15 DIY Park Controller Plane using an ESP8266 and the Arduino IDE. This was a great STEM related toy build and a very interesting initiative to teach students electronics and aerodynamics. It involved cheap components and it was a highly detailed blog with lots of video. The plane was not only handmade, he also flew it well. The first place winners were all worthy winners as well. luislabmo pimped his picade using his engaving machine, doing some detailed engraving, and producing some superb visual effects in Pimp my PICADE. fmilburn built a rainbow ukulele so his 3 year old granddaughter didn't feel left out when he was attending to "Robot Summer Camp" with her older siblings in the Rainbow Ukulele. balearicdynamics built an mp3 player and its a winner in The Musical Box. For the music generation, he uses an Arduino UnoArduino Uno aiming to create a general-purpose mp3 with a reusable design in other projects. In this particular context the Arduino mp3 player should reproduce the classical musical-box sound; to build the circuit he has an Arduino Prototype Shield. The circuit is not particularly complex and also an Arduino NANO will work fine. The core of the mp3 music player includes all the features you would find in a commercial mp3 player such as a six level equalizer preset, track selection, volume control, amplified speaker output, and earphone output.
Without further ado here are your winners...
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| The Winners |
The Grand Prize Winner
DIY Smartphone controlled tiny plane as weekend project for children and parents by ravi_butani:
First Place Winners
Creating your own Handheld Electronic Games – Pocket Nim by shabaz :
the Rainbow Ukulele by fmilburn:
Pimp my PICADE by luislabmo:
The Musical Box by balearicdynamics:
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| Honorable Mention | The following projects received first place votes from the community member judges:
Spider-Man: Into the Maker-Verse by connormiller:
The Useless Box by balearicdynamics :
ARBot by dubbie:
Kids Kingdom: Learn N Fun by mahmood.hassan:
R2-D2 Arcade Live by balearicdynamics:
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What's Happening Now
There's always stuff going on in the community and the best ideas always come from you. Suggest your idea in the Monthly Poll, and vote on the themes you want to do projects on. Build projects that scavenge energy from sources such as solar, vibrations, heat, etc. and store them in an associated storage such as rechargeable batteries, super capacitors, etc. in the Energy Harvesting competition. Or, your project can be either a vision based project involving anything that is related to Computer Vision and Machine Learning , Camera Vision and AI based projects, or Deep Learning. Or, it can be a graphics project involving something graphical such as graphics such adding a graphical display to a microcontroller, image processing on a microcontroller, image recognition interface a camera to a microcontroller, or FPGA - camera interfacing/image in the Vision Thing competition.
Thank you for continued support of Project14 !
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